Jerry Hayes

At least Ed didn't stab himself in the eye with a biro and kept his trousers from falling to his ankles. For party managers a success.

27 Mar 2015 at 08:44

The highlight of last night’s Roman Circus was watching the grade A bitch fight between Caroline Flint and Liz Truss on Newsnight. The personal loathing between the two of them oozed like a slow acting poison through our screens. The sad thing is that they were both equally awful. I had to Google Ms Truss this morning. The name is familiar. Did she write that wonderful book Eats, Shoots and Leaves? Er, no. That was Lynn. Lordy, lord, she is in the cabinet! She replaced dear old O’Patz. I always thought that he was a bit of an old duffer, but he looked like a Demi God compared to her performance which was so pedestrian that I am surprised that the BBC didn’t provide her with a Belisha Beacon. Liz, my love, this was your great chance to prove your television skills. All you had to do what say how wonderful DC was, how embarrassingly crap Ed was and answer one or two soft ball questions from an interviewer most of us have never heard of. The most obvious was about Cameron being chicken not doing a head to head with Miliband. There are a multitude of one liners to deal with this one. To witter on about the media being responsible was just daft. Didn’t you have a chat with Lynton Crosby beforehand? Well, we won’t see much of her on our screens during the election. And also, when you are in a hole on live telly, fiddling with your earpiece pretending you can’t hear the question doesn’t work and looks rather desperate.

And then Newsnight served up the Indy editor, who seems quite a sensible fellow and some woman who is political correspondent for Buzzfeed who was all over the shop. Buzzfeed having a political correspondent is like the STAR having a fine arts editor. Quite bizarre.

And the debate? Well, as a Cameroon I am biased. He survived Paxo after a clunky start about food banks and dodgy friends. But where he came into his own was with the audience. I thought they were going to be hostile. But he charmed them off the trees. It became a bit of a love in. They laughed with him rather than at him. He stayed middle of the stage and just radiated. It was a master class in how to handle a television audience.

Ed was better than most of us thought he would be, but was holed below the waterline on immigration and public expenditure. To give expenditure on the Dome as the only example of Labour waste was bordering on the insane. How the audience laughed. I felt desperately sorry for him. There was much more audience laughter in his session than Cameron’s. But they were laughing at him. Also I noticed he kept moving back to the podium after each question to consult notes. This was probably a reaction for forgetting the deficit at his famous non scripted conference speech. But it gave an unnatural feel to his performance. But party managers can heave a sigh of relief. He didn’t stab himself in the eye with his biro and his trousers didn’t fall to his ankles. And for Ed that counts as a success.